Boston music icon Thalia Zedek on tour with new trio

By Chad Berndtson/For The Patriot Ledger

Saturday

May 19, 2018 at 4:15 AM

Thalia Zedek’s seen a lot in over three decades as a working musician: an anchor of Boston’s punk and indie scenes, much-saluted, especially by fellow warriors of fringe music from here to New York City, across the country and over in Europe as well.

Now in her mid-50s, an age where many of her peers are on the reunion circuit, Zedek still seeks the thrill of new collaborations. Her latest association, a mighty trio known as E, combines her with guitarist/singer Jason Sidney Sanford and drummer Gavin McCarthy, both fellow scene veterans.

“I had gotten done with some solo stuff and I think I was getting bored with it,” Zedek said of E’s origins. “Jason and I just got together, plugged in our guitars and started making noise. There was no agenda.”

The band’s gigs are few and far between at the moment, but they’ll celebrate a new album, “Negative Work,” (Thrill Jockey) at Providence’s AS220 on Thursday and Jamaica Plain’s Midway cafe on Friday.

Lovers of Zedek’s noisier, spikier side will especially rejoice; after some years of turning to quieter, even more folk-inflected sounds in her solo work, the E material is some of her loudest, gnarliest music in ages. But E isn’t a Zedek band, it’s a collaboration, featuring Sanford and McCarthy at least as much as her own distinctive vocals and guitar tone. You can rightfully anticipate hooky but jagged music that doesn’t taste smooth going down, likes its untidy sonics and features each band member without ceding any one person full control.

The story of E began with a chance meeting in 2013, Zedek recalls, at a barbecue at Sanford’s house. Sanford, a prolific builder of custom instruments, is known to locals for his longtime role in noise-rock crew Neptune. They didn’t quite know each other, Zedek said, but “I remember seeing him in Neptune, and thinking, this is someone I’d love to try playing with.”

Next came drummer Alec Tisdale (Volcano Kings). The band released its first album, “E” in 2016, but soon found that with Tisdale’s other professional commitments, getting together was a challenge. After amicably parting with Tisdale, E brought on McCarthy, best known for his 12 years with Boston experimental punk-jazz-fusion group Karate.

Their three styles are different, Zedek admits — but they’ve clicked, with idiosyncrasy a strength instead of a hindrance.

“It’s a weird and wonderful kind of chemistry,” she explained. “As a musician, you can see people who are good musicians and never really tell if it’s going to be a good idea to get together. We got lucky.”

“E” has a number of meanings, Zedek says. All of it songs were in the key of E at the beginning, for example, and E is also an inverted symbol of Neptune, as well as a range of radio frequencies.

“I don’t know, though,” Zedek says, laughing. “After a long process of trying to come up with a name and discarding our ideas, this was the one everyone liked. Maybe I think Jason likes that we can’t be easily Googled.”

Zedek’s long list of associations reads like a bible of hipster-connoisseur indie and punk. There was White Women and the Dangerous Birds in the early 1980s, followed by the far-nastier-sounding Uzi, and a stint fronting New York band Live Skull. And that was all before Come — perhaps Zedek’s best-known band, alongside her old friend Chris Brokaw, which had an admirable run in the 1990s — and then another decade-and-a-half of solo work and six albums under her own name, the last of which came out in 2016.

Zedek still plays with past bandmates. Phil Milstein, who ran tape loops for Uzi, is back in her orbit as part of another new band, for example, an improv-noise unit called “TK” that also includes artist Heather Kapplow. And she and Brokaw are planning to gig together in the Southern U.S. later this year featuring each of them in a solo performance.

But that doesn’t mean she’s ready to revisit Uzi, or Come, or any of other previous bands.

“I really did enjoy the Come reunion [in the early 2010s] — it was such a rush to play with everybody again and felt every day like surfing on a big wave, just trying to hang on to the board,” Zedek said. “But I can’t see it again, not realistically. You can’t go back. I know a few bands of course that have done it; Dinosaur Jr. is one that is super vibrant. But I think here everyone’s kind of moved on.”

It’s not uncommon to see Zedek in the crowd at shows by her friends and acquaintances — at least as often as she’s up on stage performing. Boston is still home, she notes, and still supports its longtime artists.

“It still is a vibrant scene. There is still a lot of music going on at a lot of different venues,” she said. “Promoters still want to make things happen here, and not just the stuff you always hear about but experimental, and indie rock, and international music. It’s still a place to be, musically, and part of that is so many universities and colleges concentrated in the area. I think that guarantees a certain amount of turnover in the people who come out, and makes it fresh again. We’re still just a big college town.”

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